August 29, 2005

World Wide Web, circa 2015

During the past five years the Web has evolved from a rather 'surface' information environment to a broad and deep resource that feeds the information, research, shopping, support, and social needs of millions of people throughout the world. All this in just five years!

But such a widely-used system that is ever-faster expanding its user base, content, searchability and the services it offers takes on a life of its own as it grows exponentially. This means that the Web of today will become MUCH more valuable as the months and years go by, as new technologies, new ideas, new content, and an ever-expanding critical mass of users build upon the shoulders of every previous advance.

Because of this type of growth and the innovations and content yet to come, it's almost impossible to envision what the Web will be ten years from now (after all, it's only about ten years old today!) Yet we can assume that the breadth and depth of information accessible through the Web will expand greatly. The numbers and types of services offered, the companies that provide them, as well as those who consume them will expand greatly. Most businesses will be at a severe competitive disadvantage, to the point of extinction, if they don't do business and offer support over the Web. Long before ten years from now -- in fact already today in many cases -- the Web (is) will be as critical to business success as being listed in the paper tomes of the "Yellow Pages" used to be.

Education will become dependent on the resources of the Web, and one of the most critical skills needed by students will be expertise in how best to access, find, winnow, and validate a world's worth of information at their fingertips.

Perhaps most importantly, by ten years from now the Web will be such an essential resource that we'll have forgotten how we could have ever conducted our business or lived our lives without it. Just ask any teenager, today.

Comments

You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

Frankly I didn't find that commentary very informative. The web will be just like today, only more so. I'd rather see people make more concrete predictions and paint scenarios of how the web (and other protocols) may be used in people's lives, even if they turn out to be wrong.

One effect I think many of us feel who work on computers and have instant access to the web much of the day is how disconnected we are when offline. Sometimes I'll be driving or shopping and wonder about something, and it is very frustrating that I can't find the answer instantly. So I think we will see greater integration of web based information into our mobile environment. Cell phones will be improved with better displays, improved input devices and greater bandwidth and connectivity, so we can access the web as easily on the go as we can today when seated at the computer.

Japanese telecom giant DoCoMo has a little movie online showing their vision of the year 201x, http://www.docomo-usa.com/vision2010/ . It's cute and maybe not completely realistic but at least it paints a concrete picture of how technology could affect people's lives.

Video glasses with solid head motion tracking will become available, probably first for games, then to replace laptop displays, finally for the office. The height of nerdiness will be wearing them while walking around, in augmented reality mode. "Normal" people will only put them on when working/playing alone.

"Normals" will prefer a conversational voice interface, through their cellphone. E.g. snap a picture of a foreign language sign with the cell's camera, press the "GoogleVox" button, and say "Translate that" - and after a second hear the web-based translation service read the sign in your own language. Just ask "Where am I?" if you get lost, and get a map with a "You are here" marker.

"Social browsing" will catch on - visit any website (no special enabling required), and chat (text or voice or 3D or even video) with anyone else who is "there" and using the same social browser service. Or join a group of friends and take turns "driving" - pointing a shared view to different sites - while you yak about it. It may start on cellphones with teens, but migrate to PC browsers and VOIP, then text chat.

Tom, it's only a matter of time before "normals" are using web technology as much as they use cell phones today.

I imagine a set of glasses with integrated camera, display, microphone, earphone, and network. The glasses could be opaque or transparent (for image overlay). The microphone would be the basis of a voice input. The camera might be the basis of gesture recognition and VR navigation, but that may not catch on with the "normals."

A head-mounted information appliance has lots of advantages over a handheld appliance. It leaves your hands free. It's always available. It can tell which way your head is turned, and eventually which way your eyes are turned. It is positioned near your eyes, mouth, and ears.

Here are a couple of possible applications:

If the glasses can turn opaque in spots, then you could set them to block out ads or replace text with translated or annotated text. To do this smoothly would require good head tracking, but micro-accelerometers should be useful there.

You could send voice messages to friends simply by speaking: voice activated audio instant messaging. Maria says, "Tell Chris don't forget to pick up the milk." And then my headset says, "Maria says, 'don't forget to pick up the milk'" with the first two words synthesized and the rest in her voice. You could carry on conversations with a dozen people at once, in a dozen cities around the world. This could be done today. With video-integrated headset, instead of "Tell Chris," it could be "Show Chris" and I'd see (and hear) whatever my friend was looking at.

I'd like to predict that we will be able to carry on natural-language conversations with Google. I hesitate to predict that we'll be doing it within ten years, because I think it relies on technology that doesn't exist yet. Either automated text-to-knowledge conversion, or the web moving beyond un-annotated text--both of which "should" happen sooner than they will.

Chris:
Maybe "normals" will get used to it - we're starting to get used to seeing people wandering around apparently talking to themselves (using cellphones with a headset). With video glasses, we'd see them wandering around, apparently seeing and interacting with things that aren't there...

It would help if the front of the glasses were nearly perfectly invisible - made of clear "glass" with an index of refraction very close to air, at least on all edges.

While we may not have full natural language conversations with Google, conversational commands over a limited set of functional domains should be practical - search, define, translate, record, communicate, control, etc. We already have something fairly close for phone airline reservations and other systems.

Thanks, Dimitar. I'm not sure I agree that blogs will be based on gaming tech; that sounds more like a chat or maybe podcast than a blog. Thing is, video isn't searchable or time-compressable. It may be that by 2015 it will be, but maybe not; that'd be pretty AI-ish by today's standards.

The article on past and future computing power that was in one of the comments to your post is also worth reading:

http://roboticnation.blogspot.com/2005/08/dream-machine-2005.html

If trends continue, in ten years we'll be able to buy 1000 GHz machines (split among tens of cores), terabytes of ram, and petabytes of disk. Who'd need that? Well, in 1996, a "Dream Machine" had a whopping 32 meg of ram and a 2 gig disk.